Twitter’s ‘Firehose,’ Elon Musk, And How Lawyers Game Discovery

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(Photo by Diego Donamaria/Getty Images for SXSW)

Elon Musk’s deal to buy Twitter was rocky from the start. For one thing, he didn’t seem to initially put a whole lot of thought into it. I suppose when you’re worth over $200 billion, purchasing a social media company at a bit more than $40 billion wouldn’t be existentially ruinous even if the thing turned out to be a lemon.

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Twitter was not too thrilled about getting acquired at the outset either. The deal has moved into new stages so quickly that it’s hard to even remember it was only two months ago when Twitter’s board adopted a poison pill with the goal of preventing the takeover.

Despite all the early hiccoughs, Twitter’s leadership seems to have come around on the merits of selling out to Elon Musk at $44 billion. The company’s top executives informed employees on June 8 that they expect to hold a shareholder vote on the sale by early August. Now, though, it is Musk who is getting cold feet.

In what some observers deemed a feint aimed at renegotiating a too-high offer price, or an excuse to scuttle the deal entirely, Elon Musk started complaining about the number of bots and fake accounts on Twitter. He scoffed at Twitter’s official position that only 5 percent of the active accounts on its platform are fake.

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Perhaps this is a valid concern, although cratering stock prices pummeled Musk’s net worth in the months since he first proposed buying Twitter. This probably did make the deal seem less attractive to him. It lends credence to the idea that Musk might be looking for a way out.

Taking him at face value though, Musk has made a series of escalatory comments about Twitter’s fake account problem, and the failure of the company to provide the internal data required to make an independent judgment about how many of its accounts are fake. Musk’s lawyers told Twitter on June 6 that the world’s richest man might walk away from the Twitter acquisition if he does not get the information he is seeking.

In response to the threat from Musk’s lawyers, Twitter has now reportedly agreed to give Elon Musk access to its so-called “firehose” — the raw stream of millions of tweets spread across the platform on a daily basis.

It is unclear what the exact scope of this accommodation for Musk is going to be, but if he gets completely unfettered access to the firehose, that would mean he would essentially get to see what a user who followed every account on Twitter would see. In other words, he’d get a stream of data so large as to be impossible to make any sense of whatsoever without robust automation, advanced computing power, and a hell of a good strategy.

It is not entirely unprecedented for an outside organization to get to drink from Twitter’s firehose. For instance, MIT researchers were given access to the firehose feed, as was Google, many years ago. Still, the firehose is one of Twitter’s greatest moneymaking assets, and the company certainly will not crank open the fire hydrant for just anyone.

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Twitter’s decision here very well could be a genuine attempt to allay Musk’s concern about bots, fake accounts, and spammers. On the other hand, the lawyer in me is suspicious.

There are two very common approaches skeezy lawyers everywhere take to the discovery process (which is the compulsory process of gathering and trading information in a lawsuit). In some cases, the lawyer on the other side insists they have provided everything they have to provide that is relevant, while still (arguably improperly) holding certain things back. The other approach is to provide absolutely everything and the kitchen sink, knowing full well that the other side doesn’t have the resources to sift through hundreds, thousands, millions of pieces of evidence in enough detail to catch everything that might be important.

Twitter’s firehose feed might be good for a lot of things. What I can’t imagine it is really all that good for is allowing a complete outsider to the company to tap into it and figure out some novel way to use it to detect all the fake accounts on Twitter before the acquisition deal is voted on in a month-and-a-half.

Seems like an impossibly short timeframe to puzzle out how to wield the Twitter firehose feed. That being said, Elon Musk has surprised everyone many, many times before.

Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at [email protected].

Topics

ATL Finance, Elon Musk, Finance, Finance Docket, Jonathan Wolf